Work Qualified Accounts Using the 6QA Automated Cadence - Chris Dutton - Revenue Today - Episode # 088
3 Jan 2023 · 13 min
Chris Dutton explains how his team replaced generic email blasts with peer-to-peer sequences written by BDRs themselves, cutting unsubscribe rates. When growth outpaced capacity, they built the 6QA cadence: identify high-intent accounts, pull full contact lists, enrich data overnight, map personas, send automated emails BDRs can intercept when engagement spikes, and track results in Salesforce.
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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
The next thing is, and I talked a little bit about this, I talked about nurtures, and nurtures can be really powerful. And when I say nurtures, I'll clarify that, email nurtures. And the funny thing about email nurtures is I think when done right, they can be really effective. Prior to Sixth Sense, I came from a spray and pray type of mentality where it's let's get everyone we possibly can, let's run some nurtures, maybe we will add some content or some language in there that we think will resonate with a majority of the folks. And it worked. I don't wanna say it was unsuccessful. I don't think it was optimized or as successful as it could have been. But one of the things that we noticed, which was a clear indicator, was our unsubscribe rates were extremely high. And that was telling me that the value that we were providing, we weren't providing. So when we created our nurture here at Sixth Sense, we wanted to think about it differently. And we wanted to think about it and put sort of put ourselves in the position of our end users, our, you know, the folks on the other end that were receiving this. What do they want to hear? What do they want to see? And I don't know about you, but I really enjoy engaging with my peers, like-minded folks that are passionate, that are, you know, very aligned with, you know, the same kind of responsibilities that I am within other organizations. So we came up with this approach where we leverage our internal personas, so our, you know, our marketing leaders, our sales enablement leaders, our SOP leaders, our BDR leaders, and we worked with them to curate messaging. So we came up with a 5 to 6 email sequence that is written I mean, they've written these emails, they're in their tone, they're in their voice, they're all value, all give, and all we're trying to do is build relationships. That at the end of the day, that's, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to build relationships because we want to make sure we're engaging with our peers in a way that is valuable. And, and what we've noticed is we've noticed our unsubscribe rate is is low. And that to me is a sign of there's value here. Like what we're doing and the way that we're going about this is different than how I've done things in the past. So when I talk about peer-to-peer, like this is a great way when you tie this back to content syndication is perhaps coming up with a nurture program that you can throw those, you can put those personas into that may have some type of approach like this, where it's coming from a fellow peer, it's building value, building relationship, there's no call to actions. Again, it's just all about building those relationships. So it's been a very successful program for us, and I don't think of it as a, as You know, as a spray and pray. I mean, if everyone had the time to write these one by one, it's the same, the message would be the same. What we're doing is we're helping empower the team to be able to send these, and I should mention also that the emails come from the team, as do the responses go back to the team, so they are very engaged and, you know, making sure that we stay true to that. So this is something that I think could easily be replicated within organizations, but certainly one that, as you're thinking about your email nurture program, this is a great way to start to think about what that might look like with applying an approach like this. All right. So the last couple examples that I shared were really geared around where to start. So if you're starting from zero, Define your ICP, define those qualifying factors, criteria, right? Marketing and sales alignment, making sure from the top down there's alignment and then that cascades down through the organization. Talking about our revenue operating model, where does marketing start? Where does sales start? And what does that look like throughout these different stages, either pre-opportunity, active opportunity, post-opportunity. Content syndication, a great way to get started in an ABM world, or if you're already in a living in an ABM environment, expanding your geos, expanding your TAM. If there's product expansion, leveraging this type of approach to then start to get in front of accounts that you may not historically have been able to, to get into. Peer-to-peer persona, right? So just thinking of a way to do email differently, thinking about engaging with the right person at the right time with the right message. So those are what I would call sort of pre-qualified accounts, right? So those are kind of the things that you're doing kind of leading up to, okay, an account's qualified, what do we do? So the next thing I want to talk to you about and leave you with today is an example of, you know, one of the things that we experienced here. And, you know, that is, you know, when we were looking at, you know, the pipeline in one of our segments, you know, one of the things that we were noticing was in our segment, it was our fastest growing segment, our commercial segment, We were generating a ton of demand, which is a good thing, right? We were noticing that was increasingly becoming a larger portion of our bookings. You know, when we double-clicked, like one of the things that we saw was we actually had a capacity problem. We had more opportunities or more qualified accounts than we did capacity to work those. So we had to come up with, we had to come up with a play that was gonna allow us to ensure that when these accounts are showing those buying signals, right, we're seeing those, that high level of intent, we're seeing that they're ready to engage, right? They've done their research, they're ready to, you know, be engaged with, you know, potential solutions. We wanna be there for them. We wanna be that solution provider. And we wouldn't have the capacity to be able to go and work all of those accounts. So the first thing we did was we started to brainstorm, like, what can we do? How can we do this in a way where we're not putting additional lift on our BDR team, but in a way that's gonna help augment this so we can insert them at the right time? So we came up with this play. We've kind of branded our 6QA automated cadence here internally, But what we're doing is we're using a series of technologies to streamline a process that allows us to take these accounts that now have qualified, right? So they're in our ICP, there's 6 QAs, they've, you know, we know, you know, there's high intent there, they're engaging. So what we want to do is we want to ensure like these accounts are getting worked, right? So the first thing is we've identified those. The second thing is, is we wanna make sure the account has enough contacts in there, right? If we know 10 to 20, you know, are typically part of the buying committee, we wanna make sure we've got that representation on the account. So the next thing we do is we go and we make sure we get those contacts. We acquire those contacts, whether that's through Six Senses contact orchestration, or if you have other data providers out there. Make sure you've got full representation of what that account looks like. So when you're reaching out, you can be as effective as possible. In addition to that, we're enriching our data. So we're running overnight enrichment, making sure all of our account-level detail is accurate, making sure any contact-level detail that we need is being done, is being added onto those fields as well. And then the last thing we're doing is we're making sure that our our persona mapping run. So I talked a little bit about it in a couple of the previous slides, but that's where we look to the title and we have a program that runs every night. And then based off that title comes back with a function and seniority value, which then that combination drives a persona for us. So we know what bucket to put it in, right? We know where those personas are gonna live, right? Marketing, sales, operations. So now we can get extremely detailed and we can put the right person in the right bucket so they get the right message. Now I should also mention, when these emails go out, they're going out on behalf of our BDRs. So our BDRs can, you know, insert themselves at any moment. So if someone engages, they can, they can jump into the conversation. If someone is, you know, showing maybe higher intent and we're noticing they're on our website or We're noticing, you know, questions on LinkedIn maybe that they're asking. They can engage, but it's a way to help prioritize, you know, these automations that are running and then putting our team in a place where they can be as successful as possible. So all of this kind of runs, and this is kind of leading up to the actual send. We trigger these, this campaign or these cadences once they hit a certain day period. and then they run for, you know, X amount of time. And then the last thing I'll share is, you know, if it doesn't get measured, it doesn't really, you know, matter, I guess. Everything that we do, we measure. So we, you know, data is extremely important to us. Every campaign, we're measuring the effectiveness. So, you know, this here is a great example. You know, we're running the play, we've got a dashboard in Salesforce, we can see How many contacts we're engaging with, how many accounts we're engaging with, how many meetings that we've created. So it's been a great way for us to, you know, build a program for capacity that allows our teams to continue to be effective and give them the opportunity to jump into conversations, you know, when the timing makes sense. So with that, Um, I am going to wrap this up.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll You'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
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